#buchla 200

[trackandhold]

Daria Semegen - Arc

[nctrnm]

#NowPlaying: "Buchla Rhythm Study" by bartonmusic

[hellocanticle]

Other Minds 26, Well Part of It Anyway

Other Minds 26, Well Part of It Anyway

Chinatown’s Historic Great Star Theater I have attended nearly every OM annual concert series since 2012. But pesky adult responsibilities intervened for the last few years. Having had to miss OM 25 due to my out of town work I resolved to make it to OM 26 now that I am back in California. However circumstances conspired such that I was only able to make one night of this essential new music…

View On WordPress

[unexpectedsounds]

[jgthirlwell]

Don Buchla Modular Synthesizer inventor and pioneer RIP Thank you for the incredible instruments you developed.

[source-of-uncertainty]

The finished 285r. The balanced/ring mod section sounds fantastic, but the frequency shifter section leaves something to be desired. I can’t put my finger on it. When I use the internal modulator, there’s a grit to the output that is unpleasant, but when I modulate with an external signal the outputs sound cleaner. I think there could be some distortion at work here, so it might help for me to make the internal oscillator’s signal a bit quieter. I’ll figure out how to do that sometime soon. 

[source-of-uncertainty]

281r is assembled and working great. It just needs trimmers installed, which I’ll add tonight and then calibrate it. This one was a little tricky because the footprints for the 16mm pots were slightly vertically misaligned from the drill holes in the panel. So I bent the legs of the pots in order to get them sitting in the panel straight, and made sure to reflow the initial solder joint I’d added to each pot. They’re pretty much perpendicular to the panel now.

I’ll try to get some audio up soon. 

[source-of-uncertainty]

Work in progress on the 281r. Everything is populated on the PCBs except the trimmers (which are in the mail). I need to insert the ICs, wire up the jacks, and build the power cable. Then testing, and then I’ll add knobs and switch caps.

The panel for this one was a little tricky, because the drill holes for the LEDs were just big enough to allow the LEDs to slip out of place when I turned the module over for soldering. I got them to stick by bending kinks in the legs when the LEDs were in the right position. This is a bit weird, because the LED drill holes were perfectly snug for 3mm LEDs on everything I’ve built so far - 292, 207, 245, 266.

This module just received a new board revision and a new BOM to go with it. Some of the components on the BOM didn’t have footprints on the board. So I wasn’t missing anything, but I did end up over-ordering parts because of that.